Pages

Thursday, August 20, 2015

The Paris Wife

Are you a fan of A
Moveable Feast? Paris? The Lost Generation? Do you love that Hemingway
style of short declarative sentences that tell it exactly as it is? The one
true thing?

But not so much of Hemingway, the man?

Then The Paris Wife,
might be right up your alley.

I have gone through several life changes and Hemingway has
been right there. A needling voice, as if he’s ready to box me, take me down to
the tavern and drink me under the table, challenge me to a shark hunt. I’m
energetic, but not even I can keep up with a man who blew through mentors,
wives, and friends with a psychotic intensity. As a teenager I liked his Nick
Adams stories, and at university I read “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and was
overwhelmed by the story’s simplicity—and how it captured loneliness in sparse
language. But I also read for class his big-game hunting The Snows of Kilimanjaro and I didn’t like how women were
portrayed. I began to see him as a macho man writer, the kind of guys who hung
out at the bars uptown and catcalled women walking down the street. No thank
you, Mr. Hemingway.

Then I discovered A
Moveable Feast and I decided to cut Ernest some slack. It is a book about
writing, trying to write, trying to write one true thing. A sentence I could be
proud of. And the pain, that comes with this trying. The relationships we make
and break because of our choices. I loved the descriptions of Paris in
springtime, with hunger in his belly, walking through the gardens to Gertrude
Stein’s apartment and visiting the cafes to find a corner where he could write,
out of the way.

I
recently read an article that some coffee shops are asking patrons who use the
place as their office to move on after a few hours. Well, it makes sense,
business-wise. But consider if the Closerie des
Lilas had done that 95 years ago. No one would visit the place today;
it would simply be a footnote in one man’s literary career. Now it’s famous
because of its connection to Ernest Hemingway and others from The Lost
Generation. Famous Cafés that Spawned Literary Greats, http://www.onlinecollege.org/2011/04/13/15-most-famous-cafes-in-the-literary-world/

The Paris Wife is also
about memory and how Hemingway shaped his fiction from autobiography. That’s
where he got his material. From his war experience, from his friends that he
and Hadley met at the cafes, from their travels abroad. I don’t think there is
a single Hemingway novel that wasn’t mined from real-life. And, of course, who
is Nick Adams, but EH.

Hemingway
also wrote short sketches or “miniatures”—what today would be called flash. In Our Time is a great collection of
Hemingway’s earlier stories with flashes worked in between. He was ahead of his
time.

The Paris Wife might
not leave you a fan of the man, but no one can ever diminish the shadow his
literary efforts cast. Curiously—I’m now really interested in Pauline. I mean
look at this picture—

is she a caricature of a husband stealer? No, she looks mousy and wallflowerish. I’m now looking forward to The
Key West Wife. There’s a story there also.

Fantastic Resource!

NEW!!! e-book edition

eBook Edition Has bonus Material

Twitter

Followers

Quick Bio

Jane Hertenstein is the author of Home is Where We Live: Life at a Shelter Through a Young Girl’s Eyes (picture book), Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady (with Marie James), and Beyond Paradise (YA fiction). See BOOKS
She has taught mini courses in memoir at the university level as well as seminars at Cornerstone Festival, Prairie School of Writing. Jane is listed on the Illinois Artists Roster. Roster Artists are certified by the Illinois Arts Council to work in public schools introducing young people to the arts. She lives in Chicago where she facilitates a “happening” critique group.